It's like blaming plastic consumption on consumers. Consumers aren't the problem, corporations are. Coke doesn't HAVE to use plastic bottles, they can use cans for everything. Yet they are one of the 1 producers of plastic waste.
Carbon production is much the same. The vast amount of it comes down to corporate production of carbon that is completely out of the average persons hands to change. I can't control how a tomato gets shipped to my grocery store, and it's frankly unreasonable to think I could locally grow all my goods. I can't change the fact that my work forces in-office work.
The fact is, burning fossil fuels is cheap, and if we want that to stop then the quickest and surest way is to tax it. Once it becomes more expensive to burn fossils you can bet corporations and individuals will bend over backwards to avoid it.
The climate problem is a failure of government and lack of regulation problem, not an individual problem.
I have decided to buy no pure-ICE going forward.
I am a single-issue climate voter.
Enough people making these choices can precipitate change. Why is Tesla selling every vehicle it can make and have such a high stock valuation?
I'd say the voting power is the #1 thing individuals can do to affect change. The economic decisions are, frankly, only something that the well off can afford to do.
However, it must be understood that real impact needs regulation. It's not enough for all the well off to drive Teslas. It's not enough to install solar on your home. It's not enough to run your own home garden.
Does it have impact? Some. But we are talking about orders of magnitude problems. All the work you do gardening doesn't come close to addressing the amount of CO2 pushed out by the airline industry, cruise industry, or shipping industry.
The main thing you can do is vote for politicians that will go after climate change (or at a minimum, won't stand in the way of politicians that do).
This is an Amdahl's law problem.
Subsidized, even.
It's a fact of life.
I don't dwell on it - simply note it, then move on with the rest of the discussion. Ignoring the realities you're facing (bad air, threat of evacuation, etc) simply to avoid discomfort seems worse to me.